


Bolster

by someinstant



Series: Foundry [4]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Complicated Relationships, Episode Related, Episode: s08e04 The Last of the Starks, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 13:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18740467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someinstant/pseuds/someinstant
Summary: Lords and ladies, they can do things the rest of the world can’t. She can take a bastard to bed if she chooses, so long as no one talks about it.  Can walk away from him without a word and ignore him, too, if she likes. Rules are different when you’re highborn.





	Bolster

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, this is episode 8x04 compliant. Trust me on this, lovelies. We'll get there. 
> 
> Also, in case it is not clear: this is very definitely a series at this point, and while I suppose you could read the stories separately, they're meant to build on one another.

The blood comes away slow, caked into her eyebrow and dried along the edge of her jaw.  A thin trickle of dirtied water runs down her neck and beneath the leather of her armor.  He works carefully, wishing he had something better than the rough canvass to use as a cloth, but she doesn’t seem to mind.  The corners of her mouth go tight, though, as he presses lightly at the edges of the deep split above her eye.

“Sorry,” Gendry mutters.  His hands feel enormous and clumsy, swollen as they are.  It’s difficult to judge pressure.

She shrugs.  “‘S fine,” she says.  Rasps. It’s as much as she’s said in ten minutes, and her silence worries him.  She could chatter like a bird as a child, driving him mad with questions and demands and insults. Her quiet is unsettling-- it is not the watchful silence of flashing smirks he’s seen in the past several days; it is a quiet borne of separation, of distance.  She’s a handspan from him, and a long, long way off.

Gendry leans back, searching.  Her face is cleaner, at least, but there’s nothing he can do about the swelling or bruising.  She’ll look like the fighter she is for weeks. He would like to wash the filthy rivulets of blood and ash and sweat from her neck, but her breath goes uneven whenever his hand gets too near.  The splayed purple burn of a palm across her throat is something she hasn’t mentioned, and he doesn’t want to push.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?  Other than--” he asks, and her left eyebrow twitches.  He knows that one. “Right, yeah, no,” he says, strangely afraid that if he gives her space to speak, she won’t, and that would be worse.  “Idiot. Of course you’re hurt, we’re all hurt. What I meant was--”

She catches at his hand as he fumbles for an explanation, turning it over between her own and examining it.  Her fingers are calloused, cold and dirty, blood and worse under the nails and ground into the knuckles. Still, the bones of her hands make him think of nothing so much of stone tracery above windows, pale and delicate and strong.  She is made for fine work.

His hands are pig iron by contrast, knobbled and twisted by years of heavy heat and labor and a night of desperate violence. She presses a thumb into the hollow of his palm, where the flesh is hot to the touch.  He grunts, but doesn’t move. “Not the prettiest sight,” he admits. The nail on his left thumb is going black from a blow, and straightening his fingers reminds him of the drag of the Great Hall’s door across flagstones; the hinges of his fingers don’t seem to be working properly.  “I’m not sure I can manage a hammer right now,” he says, and hopes this is a temporary state of affairs. He wonders what he is, if not a smith.

Arya frowns.  “Where else?” she asks, and it hurts to hear her clear voice so broken.  Takes him a moment to grasp her meaning. Gendry shifts, and pulls apart the slice Davos cut in his trousers to show her the deep burnt notch on the outside of his thigh.  She grimaces, and traces the puckered edge, drawing a line towards the inside of his leg. It’s a sexless touch, worlds away from the exploration of her hands only a day ago.  “Lucky,” she says, focused on his leg. She presses down, three fingers to the left of the wound. Suddenly, he can feel his pulse in his foot. “Here, and you’d be dead.” She releases the pressure, and the pulse disappears.

“Lucky,” he agrees, and thinks of the accuracy of three dragonglass daggers planted in a post, the unerring mapping of his blood under her hands. She meets his eyes, questioning, and he says, “Slice on my back, I think.”  He twists his head to the side, like he could see the damage if he got the right angle. “Haven’t managed a look at it, yet, but I don’t think it’s too bad.”

“Take this off,” she says, and tugs at the leather of his jerkin. “Let me look.”  

Gendry fumbles the ties, and she helps him push the sleeves down his arms when it becomes clear his shoulders don’t want to cooperate.  It is cold in the twilight of the storeroom, and his shirt is soaked through with hours of cold sweat and blood and ichor. “This too,” she says, wrinkling her nose.  The stench is foul. He would be self-conscious, but she doesn’t smell any better. 

The linen is stuck to his skin along his left shoulder blade.  He struggles with it, finally gritting his teeth and yanking. Something tears open, and he swears.

“Idiot,” she says, and pushes at his ribs to turn him around to look at the damage.  She’s still a moment, and then he feels two of her fingers trace a long diagonal from the top of his left shoulder blade down to his rib cage.  The skin is tender, but it only really stings at the base of his neck.

“It doesn’t feel that bad,” Gendry says.  He reaches with his right hand to touch the painful bit, and his fingers come away red from the reopened cut.

“Blade turned,” Arya says, and he hears her dip the sacking in the water.  The cold makes the muscles in his back jump, and she puts a hand out to steady him.  “Got you mostly with the flat,” she says, and then, more distant, “They were trying to take your head.”

She told him about the execution, once, years prior.  About how Yoren forced her face into his side, about the way Ilyn Payne’s sword sang in the air, the sound her sister made, the jubilation of the crowd.  Blood on the stairs of the sept.

She doesn’t need that in her head, he thinks, so he says, “Guess it’s good that I’m a hard man to kill,” and she digs her fingers into the aching meat of his shoulder a moment, sharp and painful, and lets go.

“No,” she says, flat, dropping the damp canvass to the sacks between them.  “You’re not. You’re easy to kill,” she says, and stands. “Everyone is.”

“Arya,” he begins, but she cuts him off.  

“I should go,” she says.  “Sansa will be worried about me.”  

He doesn’t know what to say, so he settles dumbly on, “Of course.”

She turns to leave.  Pauses, and says, “Thank you for the quiet,” and is gone before he can say another word.  

He sits in the shadows a long time, something cold and heavy aching in his chest.

* * *

She killed him, they say, in silence.  Slid the knife between his frostbitten ribs easy as breathing and didn’t blink.  She must be part ice herself, they say: turned into a bitter wind and cut right through him, that’s how she could do it.  A strange little hero, their cold Northern murderer. 

They say they’re proud of her, and give her a wide berth.

Gendry grits his teeth and doesn’t mention the burn ‘round her throat that she keeps covered under the high collar of her cloak, tries not to think of the way blood from her head must have dripped beneath the white limbs of the godswood, does his best to erase the phantom pressure of her thumb from the center of his palm.  She’ll seek him out, or she won’t. She’s not for him to find.

He wonders, not for the first time, who she learned to be in the years after their time together.  Wonders if she ever got to sleep, the night after. He thinks she probably didn’t.

* * *

“Staring at her isn’t going to make her give a shit about you,” Clegane says, just before the funeral.  They’re lined up outside the North Gate, the dead laid out on endless pyres, and there could not be a less appropriate setting for this conversation.

“Shut the fuck up,” Gendry says.  Her neat grey figure is ahead of him, standing next to her brother.  He isn’t staring. She’s just in his line of sight.

Clegane snorts.  “Cunt struck,” he says, and Gendry turns fast enough to make the slice at his shoulder pull tight.

“I said, shut the fuck up,” Gendry says, low, taking a step forward.  “You want to do this, do it later. We’re here for the dead right now.”

“We’re here for the living,” Clegane replies.  “The dead don’t bloody care. They’re fuel for the fire.  But not you or me or that cold bitch of a hero.”

“Don’t call her that,” he says.  Imagines the weight of his hammer in his hands; the satisfying way Clegane’s skull might shatter beneath it.

“Which part?” Clegane asks.  He sounds nearly cheerful. “The cold or the bitch? You’re fooling yourself if you think she’s anything else.” 

“I’m a fool, then,” Gendry says, and turns away.  She’s called him one often enough. But he doesn’t think he’s wrong.  She doesn’t freeze; she burns.

Snow steps forward, and the winter winds wail.

* * *

He drinks more than he should, and in poor company.  Clegane sat first, and Gendry should have found another table-- there were plenty-- but he is, as Davos noted, a slow learner.  And Clegane knows Arya-- knew her after the Brotherhood sold him off, and if he can’t ask her, he’ll ask Clegane.

“Why do you even care?” Gendry asks, leaning across the table, three tankards deep. “I don’t understand.  If she’s a bitch, if she left you for dead-- why do you even care?”

“I don’t,” says the Hound.  Gendry thinks he might be lying, but isn’t drunk enough to say so.  Clegane breaks open a bone and sucks at the marrow. “She can fuck who she likes.  Just thought she’d have better sense than to fuck someone like you.”

Gendry nods a little; he doesn’t like Clegane, but he’s confused by Arya’s choice, himself.  Doesn’t understand it, or her, he thinks. He thought he did, but clearly not. “She’s a lady,” he says, dull.  Lords and ladies, they can do things the rest of the world can’t. She can take a bastard to bed if she chooses, so long as no one talks about it.  Can walk away from him without a word and ignore him, too, if she likes. Rules are different when you’re highborn. He drains the rest of his ale and pours himself another.

Clegane stares at him like he’s got three heads.  “Why the fuck she let an idiot like you put it in, I don’t know.”

“I could ask her,” Gendry says, “if I knew where she was.”  The noise in the Hall was dull and rolling, like the sea after a storm.  “Do you know where she is?” he asks. “She should be here,” he says, and looks towards the High Table.

“Not her nursemaid,” Clegane says.  “Not yours, either.”

Gendry thinks about the way she stilled when he reached for her after the battle, her wide eyes lost in the dark.  “I should go look for her,” Gendry says, and pushes himself up. The floor is less steady than he expected.

“That’s a mistake,” he hears the Hound say as Gendry pushes his way through the Hall, and he isn’t wrong in the slightest.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, where to start.
> 
> 1\. Gendry, darlin', what the fuck was that.  
> 2\. Promises from a monarch who hasn't actually consolidated power are entirely ephemeral, so again:  
> 3\. Gendry, darlin', what the fuck was that.
> 
> And
> 
> 4\. Gimme some time to do some character stuff, and I can fix it.


End file.
